The Expediter

by David Hagberg

  “Witnesses?”

  Turov shrugged. “What will she tell you?” he asked. “Assuming you find her. I’m told that the NIS has stopped looking. Curious, don’t you think? In any event the South Koreans certainly would not wish to take the blame for General Ho’s assassination.”

  “I know where her husband is,” McGarvey said, letting his voice drop as if he were sharing a secret with a conspirator. “He probably knows more than his wife.”

  “No one believes him. Certainly the North Koreans don’t, even if he’s still alive.”

  “We’ll see,” McGarvey said. “In the meantime you’ve given me all the proof I need that you set up the assassinations.”

  “Won’t do you any good,” Turov replied indifferently.

  “Nor you if I put a bullet in your head.”

  “I know what you’ve done and what you’re capable of, and even if everything I’d heard is true it doesn’t matter,” Turov said. He got to his feet. “Now that I’ve met you I realize that you’re simply not worth the effort to kill unless you persist.”

  “I’ll find the proof and I’ll be back,” McGarvey said.

  “Go home or die here in Japan,” Turov warned. He turned and left the tearoom.

  McGarvey watched the Russian go down the escalator, cross the arrivals hall, and walk out the front doors, never looking back. He’d found one of the answers he’d come looking for. Turov was their man, there was no doubt about it. But that left the who and especially the why. The business of starting wars usually fell to governments. The issues usually were too sweeping to interest an individual. Power, territory, national self-defense, uprisings, the overthrow of a dictator or rotten regime.

  In this instance North Korea had no reason to pick a fight with China, no matter how insane Kim Jong Il was. It was a war that they couldn’t possibly win. Even if they successfully launched all ten of their nuclear weapons into China, it would not be a decisive blow.

  South Korea had no reason to start such a war, which without a doubt would spread to Seoul. In any event Kim Jong Il had intimated that he was willing to open another round of peace talks, which would include the nuclear issue.

  Nor was Japan interested, because Kim Jong Il had made it plain in public statements that one of his targets would be Tokyo. No one believed it was anything but rhetoric. But the Japanese weren’t about to test it.

  Which left the why. What country stood to gain the most?

  He pulled out his sat phone and speed dialed Colonel Pak’s number in North Korea.

  Pyongyang

  FIFTY–SIX

  A few minutes before midnight McGarvey was waiting on the commercial pier at Nagato, a small town on the north coast of the west end of the main island of Honshu. The night was pitch-black under an overcast sky, with a light fog creating halos around the few lights. Nothing moved along the water’s edge.

  Somewhere out in the bay that connected with the Korea Strait what sounded like a highly muffled outboard motor was incoming. It was impossible to tell how close it was or the exact direction from which it was coming, but Colonel Pak had instructed McGarvey to be on this dock at this hour.

  “We don’t have much time,” McGarvey had argued. “Can’t you arrange to fly me over?”

  “Under ordinary circumstances it would take weeks or even months to arrange,” Pak had told him. “Right now it would be impossible.”

  A twenty-foot center console runabout appeared out of the mist, one man at the helm and another figure standing up in the back. As they reached the end of the pier the second figure waved, and McGarvey saw that it was Pak.

  The helmsman nudged the engine in reverse for just a second or two and the boat came to a nice stop against the dock. McGarvey tossed his bag down to Pak and then jumped aboard.

  “Were you followed?” the North Korean asked.

  “If you mean by the PSIA, no,” McGarvey said.

  Pak pushed them away from the dock and the slightly built helmsman in the uniform of a North Korean merchant seaman gunned the engine as he swung the wheel and they headed smartly back out into the bay.

  “We’re crossing to Wonsan on one of our hydrofoils that makes a twice-a-week run to Nagasaki mostly for medicines and other supplies,” Pak said. “We got lucky with the timing.”

  “I wasn’t aware that Japan was still doing this for you.”

  Pak nodded tightly. “Even now. In exchange our navy has stopped its incursions into Japanese waters.” He looked McGarvey in the eye. “We would have stopped anyway. We can’t afford the fuel.”

  “Kill your Dear Leader.”

  “It’s been tried,” Pak said. “Is that why you want to come to Pyongyang? You still don’t believe me? Or have you learned something?”

  “I want to talk to Huk Soon, if you haven’t fried his brains yet.”

  “He’s alive and in one piece, and you will be allowed to interview him, but he won’t tell you anything that wasn’t in the material I gave to you. And afterward you will have to leave.”

  “Then we’re wasting our time,” McGarvey said. “You might as well take me back to the dock. I can reach Tokyo by this afternoon and Washington in the morning.”

  “You’re not going to walk away from this, Mr. McGarvey. I know at least that much about you. Considering what’s at stake you’re in for the duration.”

  “Not if you restrict my movements.”

  “Yes, we know how you operate,” Pak said. “If we allow you to run around Pyongyang shooting at people it will only make things worse.”

  “That’s already happened, Colonel,” McGarvey replied sharply. “It’s why you came to me in the first place.”

  Pak was clearly uncomfortable. “My hands are tied.”

  “Bullshit. You not only made it to the States, but you managed to reach my house without trouble. Your hands are anything but tied.”

  A large double-decked ferryboat appeared out of the fog, sitting low in the water, its foils submerged now that it was at a standstill. Pak said something to their helmsman who immediately slowed down and circled around to the port side of the ship.

  “China gave us two of these last year,” Pak told McGarvey. “They’d been used in Hong Kong and Macau. Eighty-five kilometers per hour. They were made in your country by Boeing. We’ll reach Wonsan a little after noon.”

  “And then?”

  “And then what?”

  “We know who assassinated General Ho, but if you want to know how they did it, who hired them, and why, so that you can prove to Beijing that you’re not lying, I’ll need a free hand.”

  “I’m afraid to ask exactly what you mean.”

  “I’ll need to keep my pistol and my sat phone and I’ll need free access for Huk Soon and myself anywhere in the city.”

  Pak said something under his breath that McGarvey didn’t catch.

  “I think you’ve been given a carte blanche to do whatever it takes to prove your people didn’t assassinate the general and to do it fast,” McGarvey said.

  They’d reached the ladder that had been lowered for them. The gate in the rail above had been opened but no one was there. Davits to lift the runabout back aboard dangled from the stern and their helmsman waited patiently for his two passengers to get off.

  “I think you don’t believe me,” Pak said. “You think we may have done it, and now this is an elaborate setup to convince you of our innocence. If we can do that you could go to Beijing and make a case that they’d accept.”

  “The thought had occurred to me,” McGarvey said.

  “You want to go to Pyongyang to prove that I’m telling the truth.”

  “Or lying.”

  Pak nodded. “Okay, Mr. McGarvey, we’ll do it your way. Only understand that you’ll never leave Pyongyang alive if I am lying to you and you manage to prove it.”

  “Fair enough,” McGarvey said.

  He followed Pak up the boarding ladder to the lower deck and inside through a hatch. What had once been filled with pass
enger seats was now an open cargo area that was filled mostly deck to overhead with cardboard cartons. Some were marked with the symbol of the International Red Cross while others bore the markings of the French organization MSF Médecins Sans Frontières—Doctors Without Borders.

  “You see, at least this part is the truth,” Pak said. “There is a place forward where we can have something to eat and get some rest. It’ll take eight hours to get to our dock.”

  FIFTY–SEVEN

  The night was anything but silent, even here at a remote section of the DMZ well east of the hustle and bustle of Kaesong and Panmunjon. Huk Kim, dressed in black camos, had lain in the tall grass one hundred meters out from the barren no-man’s-zone that marked the north-south border since just after nightfall, watching for the change of guard at midnight, and the patrol routine on both sides of the tall razor-wire-topped fence.

  Even this far out the squawk of the communications radios in the guard towers, the hardy growl of the Humvees on this side and the Gaziks on the other, and the occasional voice could have guided a blind man. The harsh lights atop the towers lit the one-hundred-meter barren strip of land between the fences that stretched from coast to coast across the peninsula.

  It was less than one hundred kilometers as the crow flies from downtown Seoul to the town of Chorwon on the DMZ, and it had taken Kim less than two hours to get here, but it seemed as if she had stepped into another time and place, another world so barren and yet so filled with danger all she wanted to do was turn around right now and go home.

  Soon would be waiting for her at the apartment, demanding to know where she’d gone and why. “What could you have been thinking, you little fool,” he would ask, a puzzled smile on his face. “The tunnel was for getting out, not in. We were going to use it if we got into trouble that night.”

  But they were in trouble, and the only way she knew to reach him was through this tunnel, one of more than a hundred that crossed under the DMZ, and one of only a sparse handful that were supposedly unknown by the North, and all but forgotten and abandoned by the South because the risk of cave-ins and flooding was considered to be too great.

  “Try to put a hundred men with their equipment through there, or worse yet a couple of mechanized vehicles and the roof will come down, no doubt about it,” Soon had told her two days before they’d flown to Pyongyang via Beijing. “But just two people, moving carefully, making no sounds, could get through okay if they had to. But only if they had to,” he’d warned.

  An armored personnel carrier rumbled up the dirt road from the direction of the American–South Korean compound and stopped at the observation post. Two soldiers got out and climbed to the top of the tower, while four others entered the fortified bunker on a small rise just before the no-man’s-zone.

  Moments later two men climbed down from the tower and the four who had been replaced came out of the bunker. All of them got into the APC, which headed to the next observation post three hundred meters to the east.

  It would take the new team several minutes to get settled down for the midnight to 0400 shift, during which time they would be focused outward, toward the North and not checking their rear, which was SOP in case North Korean infiltrators made it through the DMZ.

  Keeping low, Kim grabbed her nylon kit bag and backed slowly to a narrow cut in the hill that during heavy rains and the spring snow melt was a raging stream that flowed down to a wider creek with high mud banks. At the bottom she was hidden from view by anyone watching from one of the observation towers on the DMZ, and from the main road that led back to Chorwon a few kilometers to the southwest.

  Shouldering the bag, she hurried along the creek to a stunted tree growing almost straight out of the bank that here was about three meters above the surface of the slowly flowing water.

  She scrambled down to the creek, and making absolutely certain that she was alone, shoved the tree up and to the right, taking half the riverbank with it, and revealing a pitch-black hole large enough to accommodate a jeep. Soldiers and vehicles could gain access by coming up the shallow creek, except during the floods.

  Kim did not consider herself overly claustrophobic, but she didn’t like the dark, and she especially didn’t like the sounds of running water coming out of the hole.

  She took a red flashlight out of a pocket, and shined it through the opening. A sloping gravel-lined ramp led straight back into the hill at a fairly steep angle, but she couldn’t make out a thing beyond a few meters.

  A dog barked somewhere in the distance, and girding herself, Kim stepped into the tunnel, pulling the tree that had been fitted with some sort of a swivel base back into place. Suddenly the only noises were those of the running water and of her ragged breath. There was a very strong possibility that she would die down here before she made it under the DMZ and the two kilometers to the exit.

  She took a deep breath, let it out slowly, and started down the slope. There was even more than a strong possibility that Soon would be executed for his part in the assassination. This was a risk she had to take if she had any chance of saving him.

  Ten meters in she came to the slowly moving water that looked like swirling black oil in the red beam of her flashlight. Evidently the creek had found a fault line and had eroded the bank to partially flood the tunnel. But there was no way of knowing how deep the water was, or even if the passage was clear all the way to the other side.

  She shined the light on the rock ceiling two and a half meters overhead. She wasn’t an engineer but it looked sound to her, although some water was dripping down in places. Every couple of meters it was shored up by heavy wooden beams that also looked solid.

  Soon said the tunnel had been abandoned and all but forgotten by both sides because it was far too dangerous.

  “Soon,” she said softly, and simply speaking his name out loud gave her strength. “Please help me.”

  She stepped into the water and slowly headed farther down the tunnel. The gravel underfoot was slippery and twice she nearly fell, but after fifteen or twenty meters the flow never got any deeper than her waist, and shortly after that the level began to recede until it was only up to her ankles.

  The tunnel had been built wide enough to accommodate a jeep and a column of soldiers, that along with the other tunnels crossing under the DMZ could in the time of war allow a sizeable number of men to the other side. But it was a two-way street, and had been from the start. In time of war the North could just as easily invade the South. And either side could set up explosives that would bring tons of rocks crashing down on the heads of the invading forces.

  With that thought in mind, Kim slowed her pace, resigning herself to not reach the open air possibly until morning. But it was a thing that had to be done for her husband.

  “Soon,” she whispered his name aloud.

  FIFTY–EIGHT

  It was first light of a hazy morning when the supply boat reached Wonsan, threading its way through a series of islands inside the broad bay. This was North Korea’s major seaport and standing out on deck with Pak, McGarvey counted a half-dozen cargo ships in a harbor that could have easily accommodated five times as many.

  “Is it usually this busy?” McGarvey asked.

  Pak gave him a sharp glance. “No use taking shots at me because I can’t defend what has become of my country.”

  “How do your people feel about what’s happening in the South?”

  “Most of them don’t know, or believe whatever they’ve heard is propaganda. Anyway it doesn’t pay to openly criticize.”

  “Relatives from the South were allowed to visit at one time. They must have brought stories with them.”

  “Yeah,” Pak said, a bitter note in his voice. “Why do you think the border was closed?”

  McGarvey leaned against the rail as they came up the harbor past the cargo ships to the military docks, where several small patrol craft were berthed. Farther up the inlet several low-slung concrete buildings, steel doors covering the seaside openings, were heavi
ly guarded. McGarvey picked out at least four gun emplacements.

  “Submarines?” he asked.

  Pak smiled. “We don’t have strategic submarines. Anyway I suggest that you don’t mention what you’ve seen here until you get home.”

  “Our satellites have enough pictures.”

  Four navy ratings helped with the dock lines, but neither they nor the crewmen who shoved out the boarding ramp said a thing as Pak and McGarvey got off the boat. Officially no passengers had been aboard, especially not an American.

  “One of our Special Operations Brigades is based here, but I’m sure you know all about that too,” Pak said. “They’re tough boys and they don’t take very well to activities in their backyard that they know nothing about. So we’re getting out of here immediately.”

  An old Lada sedan trundled through a security gate at the end of the dock and headed their way.

  “Our ride?” McGarvey said.

  Pak nodded. “My sergeant, Ri Gyong. He’s a fine man, but he’s like a lot of cops, he looks only straight ahead.”

  “Will he be a problem?”

  “Not unless you pull out your pistol and discharge it. In that case you wouldn’t want to be anywhere near him. He’s a good man.”

  “He’s bought the party line, but you haven’t. Interesting mix.”

  Pak gave McGarvey another sharp look. “He’s a realist. And as far as he and the rest of my staff are concerned you were never here, and the sooner we can take you back to Japan the happier everyone will be.”

  “Fair enough, as long as you understand that my whereabouts are known to a few key people.”

  Pak shrugged. “Your disappearance inside Chosun would present us with no greater a problem than we’re already facing. But you’re here to help us.”

  “I’m here to find out who killed General Ho and why,” McGarvey corrected. “Don’t forget it.”

  The car pulled up and Ri got out. He looked McGarvey up and down but didn’t offer to shake hands. “So this is him.” His English was heavily accented but understandable.